First Confirmation that Its Not 2011 All Over Again

New Claims out today and a big drop as many Easter seasonal advocates had argued. However, that’s not actually what interests me. If you look at Year-over-Year percent decline in Nonseasonally Adjusted Claims then they were running in a pretty tight band.

This suggested that despite the waviness in the week-to-week numbers the pace of improvement was essentially constant since last year.

Yet, there did seem to be a real slow down last year beginning in late April. What we would have hoped then is to see the year-over-year gap widen and we did in fact get that, at least for this one read.

My best guess is the annualized 10% rate of improvement in initial claims continues to chug right along.